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I've recently installed 11.04 on a fresh Lenovo ThinkPad T410 with a 9-cell battery, but it totally drains up from full battery after about 2:30 - 3:00 hours of normal use (mainly web surfing).

The other problem is that brightness keys are detected, but not working. when I increase/decrease brightness, the notification appears (and it shows that it's been increased/decreased) but nothing changes.

How can I resolve this issue? Is there a human-friendly solution? Is there any plans to solve this problem out-of-the-box in next releases?

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I would suggest to find the reasons behind this by installing powertop utility. Using this we can know which software components are causing high power consumption. – kkp Jun 8 '11 at 19:49
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4 Answers

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Brightness keys work on my Thinkpad (T410i) after fixing /etc/X11/xorg.conf (you need to relogin to apply these changes):

Section "Device"
    Identifier "Default Device"
    Option "NoLogo" "True"
    Option "RegistryDwords" "EnableBrightnessControl=1"
EndSection

The high power consumption might be related to a kernel issue. Downgrading to 10.10 might help, but I haven't tried this yet.

Generally, Ubuntu runs quite well on the T410. (I've written a short overview).

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About energy consumption... That's not the strong side of Ubuntu. It drains my 6-cell battery in 2 hours usually. Ubuntu uses lots of effects, services, etc.

If you want your laptop to work longer, try Unity2D desktop environment. It looks nearly like Unity, but uses much less resources. Check "Unity2D" in Software Center.

You should also check if any unneded programs are running.

For even lower energy consumption, you can try LXDE desktop environment, though, that's probably more advanced solution. Check "Lubuntu" in Software Center.

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Actually, the one thing I'm sure of is that problem is not in the DE. Personally I think there is some sort of problem specially in integration with ThinkPad laptops. Because all 6-cell non-ThinkPad laptops around me (using same DE and distro) work for almost the same (or more) time. But a friend of mine also reported that his ThinkPad laptop is abnormally consumes power in ubuntu (I don't know if this issue happens in other linux distros or not). – Arash Badie Modiri Jun 9 '11 at 15:12
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I've got a 6-cell and it drains in 1 hour to 1 and a half hour.. It's really annoying indeed >.< There is something that makes it run a bit longer on battery though, powertop. Just install powertop and whenever you're working on battery open a terminal and type sudo powertop, then press enter.

At the backlight control problem, can you tell me if thinkpad-acpi shows up when you run lsmod?

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Check if the cpu is running at full speed all the time. In a properly configured system, the cpu will 'throttle' itself, run slower, when it's not doing work. I'd installed 11.04 on my thinkpad and noticed the cpu was not being throttled.

CPU Temperatures were high (command: acpi -V), and I wasn't able to adjust cpu governors. Reverted to using 10.10.

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